Concorde
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The Colorado startup dreaming up a return to supersonic flight
In less than 50 days, we'll see the test plane for a future supersonic airliner. In a year, we could see it fly for the first time. After that? Who knows.
Boom's supersonic jets will pick up where the Concorde left off
Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl wants passengers to break the sound barrier. Since the demise of the supersonic Concorde passenger jet, commercial airlines haven't offered a quicker alternative to fly from point A to point B.
QSST, new supersonic jet, will travel coast-to-coast in two hours
Many of us here at Engadget are, or at least wish we were, the jetsetting type. The type to constantly bounce around to Boston, San Francisco, Hong Kong and other exotic locales. We'd definitely appreciate being able to traverse the continent in two hours, and while our overloads, erm, friendly bosses might appreciate that, our accounting department probably wouldn't. And surely this new generation of supersonic flights, which will reach top speeds of Mach 1.8, aren't going to come cheap. According to Wired News, this new supersonic private jet, called QSST ("quiet supersonic travel") is in production by Lockheed Martin. The new jet sports a "patented inverted V-tail", which will reduce the sound of its sonic boom to less than a hundredth of the original Concorde, one of the reasons why it was met with limited success in the US. The QSST's current price tag of $80 million is still cheap by comparison to the first generation of Concorde jets, which cost $46 million in 1977 (nearly $150 million in 2005 dollars when adjusted for inflation). So save your pennies, kids, we'll be saving ours.
